Tech Patrol Ramsinks

Introduction

Tech Patrol are an online store based in Australia selling computer overclocking aids. The Tech Patrols range of coolers are for video cards, processors, monitors, hard disks and ram. Tech Patrol were one of the first online stores to start selling copper shims online in Australia and the World. The Tech Patrol were kind enough to have given us one of their Ramsink kits for review at TweakTown.

The Ramsinks

The Ramsinks that were provided to us reminded me of the heatsinks that are used on the memory of most GeForce 2 Ultras, but only a lot bigger in height and different in colour. These babies are 1.74CM height and are 1.52CM in width. This make these sinks larger than most SDRAM modules used on video or ram modules. When installed onto the memory modules of either PC memory sticks or video memory, these sinks touch each other, this spreads the heat out evenly and allows for better cooling.

Tech Patrol supplies these heatsinks in quantities of eight per package. The reason behind this is most ram modules or video card modules usually have eight or less memory chips. Some ram modules are double sided so if you wish to do both sides of the double-sided ram modules you will have to get two packs. With the size of these heatsinks if you are going to use them on ram sticks you will loose 1 or 2 DIMM slots due to the size of them.

Epoxy and Installation

HighSpeed PC provided us with some Arctic Silver thermal epoxy. The epoxy (adhesive) came in a two tubes. Tube A contained the Arctic Silver thermal compound with a glue resin, in tube B was the epoxy hardening agent, when mixed together it creates a very efficient heat transfer paste. A word of caution, make sure that after you have applied the Ramsinks to the desired product that you do not make any mistakes because once this epoxy has hardened its almost impossible to remove the heatsinks. We had to put our GF2 GTS we used to test the Ramsinks inside a plastic bad and put it in the freezer for around 20 minutes to make the epoxy brittle.

The instructions for the thermal epoxy are very plain... Mix 1 part of tube A with one part from tube B, mix the two together and then apply it to the memory modules. Place the heatsink onto the ram module with the epoxy applied to the memory module and wait 5-6 minutes, after 5 minutes the heatsink was impossible to remove.

The picture above shows the finished product with the Tech Patrol heatsinks installed using the epoxy. We used an ABIT Siluro GF2 GTS 64MB video card with a Thermaltake Blue Orb for our reference video card. When installed, the heatsinks stick up far enough as to block the PCI slot under the video card making PCI slot one useless.

As we can see after installation we were able to increase the memory speed form 400MHz to 425MHz. While this may not seem like a lot, it gave us an extra 864 3DMarks over the 400Mhz ram settings in 3DMark 2000.

Conclusion

The Ramsinks we received in my opinion are some of the best I have ever seen, professionally made, and with a good thermal epoxy these sinks are well worth the money if you wish to overclock your video cards RAM or SDRAM. The only con we came us with was that they are quite big and block the PCI one slot.

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